ROME - The United Nations says its 2009 headline-grabbing announcement that 1 billion people in the world were hungry was off-target and that the number is actually 870 million.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization blamed flawed methodology and poor data for the bum projection, and said it now uses a much more accurate set of parameters and statistics to calculate its annual estimate of the world's hungry.

The FAO issued its 2012 state of food insecurity report Tuesday, and its core point was to set the record straight about the number of the world's undernourished dating back to 1990.

The FAO says the good news is that the number of hungry people has actually been declining steadily over the past two decades, although progress has slowed since 2007.